My Favorite Indy Car

[pje]

My favorite Indy car is also Mario Andretti’s favorite Indy car.
As Jordan posted a while back:

www.indianapolismotorspeedway.com/news-multimedia/news/2020/02/24/my-favorite-car-mario-andretti-2020?fbclid=IwAR3wSgZsMcyu81dG0Yt1Cdgfu-dUjHHTNtOfxmGbtSoLuBYshvQw1ObVSPw

And from the Marshall Pruett Podcast:

racer.com/2017/05/17/rear-view-mario-andretti-s-1987-indy-domination/



With Marco winning the pole for this year’s Indy 500 we’ve all been reminded that it’s been 33 years since an Andretti has sat on the pole at Indy and of course 33 years since this car led the 1987 field down for the green flag and so dominated the race. Well, most of the race and sadly it didn’t go well for Marco this 2020 race either.



I’ve been working on Mario’s (and mine) favorite car since Michael introduced his decals for the car so many years ago. There are very few racing cars that I have spent as much time researching as this car and even though there have been many builds of this kit on this board, I hope I can pass on some of my research in this build and offer up a few new aftermarket pieces to help make this model a more accurate representation of Mario’s Lola T8700 or any T8700 or T8800.
Here are the extra or modified parts I’ve come up with for this build. I’ve been having fun working with Kevin Kuzman of Silver City Models and Kevin has made just wonderful castings of my masters. You can contact Kevin at [e-mail] for info on purchasing these parts.



The first thing the AMT kit is so lacking in creating any 1987 or 1988 Lola is the head rest area. So, I’ve redone that area that properly features the vents on the headrest. I’ve also done a new speedway rear wing using the Monogram speedway wing as the basis. Next up are the front wheel hubs. The ones provided in the kit use large road course brake scoops. I don’t believe any speedway Lola ran with these scoops. Certainly not on Mario’s car in 1987. Then come the last two little details, but important ones for me. All 1987 and 1988 Lola’s had a small blister at the gear shift, so I’ve come up with one and then the last thing, a MOMO steering wheel. The AMT kit is of a 1988 Lola and has a Lola steering wheel. At least on Mario’s 1987 car and I believer Bobby Rahal’s car, a MOMO steering wheel was used. As I incorporate each part I’ll fill you in as to its usage.

Paul Erlendson

[2lapsdown]

That was my first race. I had my heart broken twice

John

[quattro]

Wow.

Taking the time and trouble and then sharing that knowledge and work.
Glad I didn't start mine sooner.

Best get on to Kevin then....

[pje]

Thank you.
John, I so feel your pain. Since we didn’t have a normal Memorial Day weekend this year, instead of watching the rerun of last year’s race I went on to YouTube and watched the 1987 race in its entirety. There’s an updated video of the network broadcast. It’s letterboxed a bit and very clear. Worth a watch if any of you wish to relive that day. No matter how many times I see the race it never turns out differently.
I first started this build as Arie Luyendyk’s car years ago when the kit was first introduced. At that time my thinking was that I could get around one of the main problems of the kit build. That’s the seam between the upper and lower sections of the chassis. At the time I had seen the issue of On Track magazine that featured one of the first cars that came from the factory. You could see the dividing line between the carbon fiber upper half and the aluminum lower half of the chassis. Since I was building a black car, and I thought the seam would be slightly visible anyway, I decided to install two threaded posts that would allow me to screw the assembly together with countersunk screws at the bottom of the car. Now with a red car I’ll be rethinking that a bit, as I can detect no seam in the photos that I have. I presume that the seam was filled somehow before painting.




Apparently I’ve been in my own little cloud since I shifted this car from Arie’s car to Mario’s car and it wasn’t too long ago that with the change from a Cosworth to a Chevy I realized that I had to use a different engine cover. So, with that in mind I’ve screwed the top and bottom together, and then added some 0.010” Evergreen to start the process in getting a good fit of the Chevy engine cover to the rest of the body work. This is the major fault in this kit and I can’t tell you how many hours I have devoted to getting a good even seam for the engine cover. Since at this point I haven’t done any priming I expect more work in this area.

Paul Erlendson

[indycals]

IMO that was the most dominant car in Indy history. Yes there were cars that lead as many as 198 laps, with 190 being hit several times (Clark, Unser sr. 190, Vuky 195)... but all of those were before cars bunched up for cautions. Had Mario's car held up he would have led 193... with bunching up (and many cautions). Without bunching under yellow, he had a flag-to-flag car.

[SWT500]

Don’t forget Billy Arnold in 1930 and he won.

[pje]

The first thing to modify are the side pod radiator openings. They look somewhat different on Mario’s 1987 Lola that he ran at Indy than the way they are represented in the 1988 Lola kit. Both openings were enlarged and there were no panel lines, so they were filled in. If you can zoom in on the drawing you can see the red lines that represent where to cut.



You will see in this build that I do a lot of scribing to separate parts in lieu of sawing. To do that I’ve been tack gluing pieces of Evergreen plastic down as my scribing guide. I found this piece gave me the perfect width to use and get a parallel cut with engine cover.





I removed the radiator engraving in the ducts as it facilitates greater ease in painting and I want to use some PE radiator material that I used in my Protar McLaren MP4/2C chassis.



These two photos show the job done. The reason for the extra plastic and putty on the right side pod was I decided to scribe out the entire panel using the original panel line. That opened the side pod up more than I wanted and I had to fill it back in with Evergreen and a little putty.





The piece of plastic with the hole taped on the right side is a template for scribing the fuel filler cap. Something entirely missing from the AMT kit.

Paul Erlendson

[harveythedog2]

Great stuff Paul. I know how hard you have worked on this model and it shows.

1987 was my 1st Indy 500 as well. I was just 25 years old and my buddy talked me into going. I had been a casual race fan but that was it. If a race was on TV I would watch it but I didn't seek out the schedule or follow it. I went to party! Party we did but come race day I was sitting in bleachers on the inside of pit row. The stands across from us were yelling "Less filling!" and our stands were yelling "Taste great!" It was also when "The Wave" was popular and I watched in awe as hundreds of thousands of people did the wave. Unknown to me was the pure excitement and vibrations in my chest that were to come. And that was just the pace laps! When those 33 cars came screaming by when the green came on, I felt like never before. I too was devastated when Mario dropped out but that is a different story. On that day however I was totally smitten. Indy or Indycars have been on my mind every single day since. Even started building model cars again after that race. 33 years ago??? Hard to believe.

[shunter]

Loving the story and your work. Looking forward to the next update.

[pje]

Just a little detail, but one that Stu and I spent a lot of time looking for conformation on is the NACA ducts on the lower side of the side pods. There was no duct on the left side, so that one was filled in. There was one on the right side and that was left as is.



Paul Erlendson

[pje]

Over the years since I got my first AMT Lola I’ve wished that the headrest area was more prototypical so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to accomplish that goal. Since I’m a retired drafter the first thing I did was bring a photo into AutoCAD and start figuring out the size of the two inlets and where they fit. Once I had it drawn up and printed I glued it to a piece of sheet plastic and tried to use punches to create the three corners.





I noticed awhile back that Calvin was successful using this technique on his Lola T8900. I don’t remember seeing this at the time, but if I did, I bow to the originator. He’s always been an excellent problem solver.

I was never satisfied with that and was showing my good friend Dave Paar what my challenge was and he came up with a solution. With my measurements he milled out two “L” shapes in some sheet plastic. Once we had that I was able to complete the triangle shapes with cutting out the hypotenuse of the triangle.




At that time I started thinking that I would have an easier time working with the headrest area if I cut a chunk off the body. I did that and then removed the area that I was replacing. That’s as far as I got for quite some time until Covid came along and like a lot of us I started spending more time in my model room. By that same time I got to know Kevin via email and over the phone because I helped out plan wise in a couple of his projects. I got to talking to him about what I wanted to do with this Lola and I proposed mastering a few parts for it. The center of my thoughts was this headrest area. Since I already had separated it from the body I thought that would be a good way of creating a replacement piece.






I was still having problems getting this little sheet attached until I came up with the idea of a center support that I could first glue it to. Next was the problem of achieving a nice curve. Fortunately I had a step roller tool that had the perfect circumference that I needed to create the proper curve. First I got the sheet plastic taped to the roller. I then aligned the roller with the taped on plastic to the head rest piece and secured the whole thing with more tape. When I was confident of the alignment I used my Tamiya thin cement to glue everything together. Then it was a matter of trimming off the extra plastic sheet and filling in the gaps with my favorite putty, Mr Disolve Putty.

Paul Erlendson

[Calvin]

Nov 24, 2020 22:20:17 GMT -5 pje said:

I noticed awhile back that Calvin was successful using this technique on his Lola T8900. I don’t remember seeing this at the time, but if I did, I bow to the originator. He’s always been an excellent problem solver.

Lol thank you.
But to be honest with you I hardly put any thought into it.

My thought process back then was, its wrong > use thin styrene > cut out holes free handing it with an X-acto knife. 🙃

Your way is way more professional

[shunter]

That is superb, it’s one of the areas that annoys me, but I’ve been lazy, worried I wouldn’t get it right etc so I have never done anything.
This just looks so good.

[pje]

I’m learning a lot through this process. You think you’ve thought of everything but things just don’t work out perfectly. I’m certainly finding even more respect from our resin kit manufacturers on this board. I thought this little headrest would just require a little bit of cutting and the new resin piece would just drop right in. I confess that it takes a little more than that. I made my two cuts and discovered that I had to remove more material underneath. I did that with a sanding stick and of course I didn’t have it level so I took too much off on one side. I glued a little strip of 0.010” Evergreen plastic on to the body and got things level again.




Now the alignment. When I originally lopped off this piece of the body that I then modified, I didn’t give enough thought on gluing it back on. In retrospect I would probably start differently, but this is what I have. I’ve come up with a pretty straightforward way of aligning this piece. When the top of the resin part is level with the remaining plastic use a roll bar to align everything. I used some temporary glue and glued the roll bar to the resin piece. Then, it was a simple matter of fitting the rest of the roll bar into the two troughs. Once I did this I knew I had my new resin piece aligned properly.





The fit wasn’t perfect though. I had removed just a hair too much in my vertical cut, but a little glue and putty took care of that. I didn’t worry about any little gap in the troughs as that is hidden by the roll bar. Also, for some reason the resin piece was just a hair too narrow, so I had to lay on a little putty to get it all looking right. I also used the windscreen as an alignment tool as I wanted a good fit there too. All in all I’m very happy with the final result and how everything looks. But it certainly took more work than I anticipated.






Paul Erlendson

[Art Laski]

Hi Paul,

This is looking really good! I really appreciate the attention to detail you have put into this.

-Art

[pje]

Thanks Art!
Next up in the super anal department is the gear shift blister. It’s a very subtle shape on the T8700 but I wanted to include it. What I started with makes a good start but it still requires some work. I started by smoothing down the backside of the blister to get it as level as possible before super gluing it down.



After that had dried I ran a bit of my favorite Mr Disolve Putty around the edges. I then proceeded to sand off about half of the blister to get it to a prototypical size.



Once that was done I used my Dremel tool to freehand out the blister shape on the inside of the bodywork. I might have got ahead of myself as in this photo it’s not centered exactly with the hole for the gear shifter. Since I plan on some detail work in the cockpit I’ll wait until I do that to decide if I have to modify the blister location a bit.



Paul Erlendson

[Gary Davis]

Man Paul...your work and attention to detail on this bad boy is great. Thank you for posting all of this work that you've done. I'm looking forward to your next update for sure...

[shunter]

Love that touch of the blister, easily missed.

[pje]

I never liked the AMT speedway rear wing but it took me awhile to completely figure out why I didn’t like it. Most of the photos that I’ve found of the car didn’t give me a good close up look at the wing. A number of years ago I was cruising around eBay and found a set of slides for sale. The slides were taken by a professional photographer who had pit access during practice. He was also offering to sign over the rights to those slides. They seem to have been running under the radar and I got them for what I thought was a very reasonable price. Here you see one of my favorites with my watermark on it. When I saw how the wing flipped up and made the curve to the side plate I started thinking of how to create that shape. It didn’t take me long to pull out a Monogram kit and see that they had done a pretty fair job of capturing the shape. Once again, Dave Paar came to my rescue and milled the two slots needed to mount the modified Monogram wing to the wing supports. Because the fit of the original wing was perfect, a little sanding is needed on the wing supports to get a good fit of this resin copy.



The AMT wing.



My modified Monogram wing.



Paul Erlendson

[Gary Davis]

Great job on the wing modification Paul. This is really looking good.

[woody86]

Really nice attention to detail. Sometimes these little things make all the difference.

[jj66]

Love the cleanliness, attention to detail and explanations you give in each step!

[harveythedog2]

Looking great Paul. Looking forward to seeing more!

[quattro]

I almost dug up an older thread but this thread is so brilliant I reckon it should stay up front.

But what I was gonna dig up after browsing some of the excellent threads from the past is kinda related to this one.

If you will indulge me.

Andretti 1/25th models.

The old thread was this one.

mb2501.proboards.com/thread/4582/1984-lola-t800

For a moment I felt like I did after a 12 hours shift and then going to the shops to discover all the bog roll had been sold out!
But the T800 has never been produced in kit form at 1/25th has it?
I didn't miss the boat like I have with so many other kits have I? Probably not.

Yeah yeah. I like my Sullivan stuff, but since joining this forum I quietly got on with getting together all the Andretti stuff I could in 25th.
The M24 and 83 Lola from Silvercity. The Wildcats from Calvin. The AMT stuff.
And it seems from scouting around on here that there would be a big demand
for the '80 Penske (blimey. How would one do the mirror silver?)
and the '84 to '86 Lolas.
Probably mentioned this before somewhere.

Feel lucky that I didn't start this one earlier. This is so great. Thank you for sharing the knowledge and the build.

[pje]

Earlier I talked about my original idea was to have the upper and lower half’s of the car screw together. Since I had already done all the work I decided to stay with the idea but in a different way.
The first thing I did was screw the half’s together as originally planned. Then, I glued them together from the front of the radiator intake openings to the nose. Then as you can see in the photos I laid out Evergreen strips and glued them down to use as guides for scribing.




Worked great and I now have a pretty prototypical looking body floor. I did discover that I will have to do a little shimming so everything aligns as the floor is not at the proper level at the nose. Also, as usual when you separate panels by cutting or scribing and then want them spaced tightly you have to fill the gap caused by the width of the cut. Here I used 0.010” Evergreen on one side and 0.015” on the other.





Paul Erlendson

[pje]

Note that I’ve removed and filled in the vortex generator area of the underside of the floor. I have never been able to find evidence of their existence on a T8700 Lola. Nigel Bennett designed the T8700 Lola before moving to Penske in the summer of 1987. In his book Bennett talks about experimenting with vortex generators in the wind tunnel, but as far as I can tell he did not have them on his 1988 Penske PC-17. It wasn’t until later Penske’s that you can see them prominently featured. Bruce Ashmore took over the Lola design department for the 1988 car and I believe that he is responsible for them being featured on the T8800, and I have been able to see them on a T8800. That being said, Mario drove a T8700 for the three superspeedway races in 1988, so if you’re building the K-mart car I question vortex generators being featured on that car too.

Paul Erlendson

[shunter]

Keep the great work coming...

[pje]

Now for the other side of the floor. I know on other Lola’s the intake screens can be seen but I’ve not found them on Mario’s T8700 Lola. I could be that they were just in the shadows or placed further back but I decided to remove them from the back of the intakes and leave the opening. Since there’s quite a lip I then filled that in with putty to form a ramp. Might be overly anal to do that but I didn’t want to be in final assembly and have it stand out.





I've got to add a bit of sheet plastic to support the front wing and this will be ready for some primer.

Paul Erlendson

[Calvin]

Well, this build has already turned into the benchmark for this kit. LOL

[pje]

I felt the need to have a look at how everything is fitting together.

Paul Erlendson